By Janus Boye
Janice Fraser co-founded Adaptive Path back in 2004 and has since then worked with innovation and leadership development. In April 2023, she published Farther Faster and Far Less Drama with Jason Fraser.
“The world around you might constantly be in flux, but you don't have to be”
From team leaders to consultants to stay-at-home parents, everyone wishes life could be less complex, but that often feels impossible.
In a new book with the charming title “Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama”, the two authors Janice and Jason Fraser offers a simple but powerful set of leadership behaviors to align teams and accelerate progress.
Recently Janice Fraser jumped on a member’s call to introduce the book, share her thinking on why some teams move fast, while others move slowly. She also introduced the Four Leadership Motions, a method the authors have been using for decades to help all kinds of teams make fast, meaningful progress—including Navy SEALs, startup CEOs, and Fortune 100 executives.
In the inspiring call, we also covered Janice’s favorite management book, talked about no more meetings, and much more, but let’s start at the beginning.
Why yet another management book?
My copy of the book - notice not only the how the authors like alliteration (FFFD), but also the asterix on stress which denotes the broad scope of the management book. It will help reduce feeling overwhelmed, chaos, frustration, waste, indecision, friction and blickering
Janice opened by describing how the book has been 20 years in the making. She said that she hates tension, but she has also started 6 companies and has become quite familiar with walking into chaos by default.
Over the years, she noticed how some teams were moving remarkably fast, while others were moving much slower. This made her curious on what leaders were doing and she started identifying differences and looking for similarities among those making extraordinary progress.
The intention with the book was not to write yet another textbook on management, or a dry read on all the latest theory, but rather an accessible book to support leaders in a modern context. I’ll quickly add to say that the book actually is based on quite a fair amount of theory, but it’s actionable.
The book has an inspiring foreword by Eric Ries, known from The Lean Startup method. He makes the good point that the frameworks are flexible and that’s also the case for the me Four Leadership Motions.
Before we get to the motions, let’s do some quick math.
Just a little better everyday
In the dedication at the front of the book (to Jeana and Evan, the authors kids), you’ll find this simple, and probably familiar entrepreneurial math:
"1 x 1.01 Every Day"
That’s Janice’s motto, and really also a key message I took away from reading the book: Progress is the goal. Become a little bit better every day. A little more, a little improvement.
Similar to Eric Ries’ work with lean startup, it’s all about experimentation and continuous learning. In our call, Janice also referenced agile software development, which is also all about continuous improvement. As a side note, Janice mentioned Kent Beck’s Extreme Programme Explained from 1999 as the best management book she has ever read, in particular because it values communication so highly.
Whether you work with software or not, and Janice has advised many who are not in software, this is public secret to how teams become great.
Introducing the Four Leadership Motions
The book really has 4 main parts, one for each leadership motion. Every motion is described with a few chapters and at the end of every chapter, you’ll find an activating workshop to help you turn the insights into practice straight away.
The leadership motions are:
1) Orient honestly to understand the complexities of any situation
Take a minute to get really clear about where we are now, and what makes this moment challenging. If I’m in Miami and you’re in Denver, we can’t use the same driving directions to get to Albuquerque. When we know where we’re starting from, we have a chance of making it to our destination.
2) Value outcomes more than plans, activities, or deliverables
Planning is great, but plans are fallible when confronted with real life. To find flexibility and greater success, we must place more value on the outcome than we do on our plans, deliverables, and activities. This makes room to course correct when circumstances unfold unpredictably (as they always seem to).
3) Leverage the brains by tapping the right people and maximizing their contribution
Involving the right people in effective ways is not a straightforward job, and bringing people in will have its own complications. However, the right people bring ideas, knowledge, and decision-making power, augmenting our memory and processing speed. With the right people, we can take faster, more appropriate actions.
4) Make durable decisions by eliminating the two pernicious kinds of waste
By fretting too much over the “right” decision, going for consensus, and revisiting decisions after the fact, decision-making is a huge time-waster. The fix is simple—just change the standard: Decisions don’t need to be “right” (how would you know, anyway?), they just need to move us forward. We don’t all need to love it, but everyone has to be able to live with it.
Meetings are a waste of time, patience and social capital
Towards the end of the call, Janice shared how she says no to meetings. Semantics matter as she said and we shouldn’t just meet, we need to do better.
The book actually also has a small chapter on this, which shares the story of a purposeful startup, which was wasting time in meetings and consequently stalling progress.
If you’ve been inside a large, complex organisation, you might even have experienced pre-meetings. Here’s a slightly shortened quote from the book on what the authors have to say about those:
“The most telling evidence that meetings are essentially bankrupt, is the prevalence of pre-meetings. Their goal: to make sure nothing surprising happens at the meeting. Instead of harvesting the best thinking, pre-meetings stymie important conversation and trap wisdom in silos".
The chapter references Harvard professor Linda Hill, which has a concept called Creative Abrasion. It describes the kind of productive disagreement that improves our thinking. We can hash out the considerations and then choose a course of action -- that's what the authors also mean by leveraging the brains.
Even when we disagree, we can align on a way forward together. This is really the management principle of Disagree and commit and it's pretty powerful, and might just be the heart of humble, respectful collaboration.
Learn more about Further, Faster and Far Less Drama
There was more in our conversation and there’s naturally much more in the book.
In closing, Janice mentioned how leadership is not just a promotion into a role, it’s instinct and action. Her hope with the book is that we can get teams moving, so that we can solve bigger problems! That’s the world needs, I’ll add.
You can lean back and enjoy the entire recording from the call below.